Network technologies such as Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV) connect geographically dispersed data centers across networks to balance resource workload without affecting the stability of the overall network. These networks typically include unicast core networks or multicast core networks. Unicast core networks connect resources using a unicast protocol that is a one-to-one communication to forward data packets (e.g., Internet Protocol (IP) packets) from a sending node to a receiving node. Unicast packets are sent from a single sending node to a single destination node. In sending unicast packets from the sending node to the destination node, unicast packets might pass through other devices as they are transmitted across the network. In contrast, multicast core networks connect data center recourse using multicast protocol that is a one-to-many communication of IP packets between one node and multiple nodes, which elect to participate in a specific multicast group. Multicast communication can be used for multiple-user multimedia applications such video conferencing, distance learning, and collaborative computing.
When data centers connect and communicate from a multicast core network across a unicast core network, data packets sent from the multicast core must be replicated for each destination node in the unicast core. For example, using an Adjacency Server (AS) mechanism, an adjacency server (e.g., an OTV edge device) maintains overlay adjacency information, and informs other edge devices of this information, accordingly. For each multicast delivery group, a unicast replication list is constructed and maintained by each edge device, so multicast traffic can be delivered to all receivers over non-multicast IP network as a collection of unicast messages. As such, this results in an increase in network traffic to transmit redundant data packets.